Youth development

Youth development is crucial for social and economic progress, especially in disadvantaged communities, and this is an important focus for Nokia’s community involvement activities. We support life skills education programs with several partners that develop confidence, teamwork, leadership, and conflict management in around 40 countries.

Partnership with the International Youth Foundation

The International Youth Foundation (IYF) is one of Nokia’s main community involvement partners. The IYF supports thousands of effective programs making a lasting difference to young people. Its mission is to identify programs that work, strengthen their impact, and expand their reach so many more young people benefit. During 2007 Nokia supported projects that directly benefited more than 25 000 young people. Their work in turn helped more than 91 000 other people.

Nokia is the founding sponsor of the YouthActionNet leadership program aimed at reaching young people who are leading societal change. In 2007 we awarded twenty fellowships in 14 countries, selected from an application pool of more than 300 young social entrepreneurs. The Fellows included a 21-year-old Canadian working to combat the global sex trade in children and a 28-year-old in the Philippines who provides loans to underprivileged youth to start small enterprises.

Read more about the inspirational young people who have participated in YouthActionNet

YouthActionNet runs training and networking events for the Fellows and connects them with each other through a networking website.

These case studies give further examples of IYF projects supported by Nokia in 2007:

During the 2007 calendar year, we also awarded 45 scholarships worth US$184 508 to young people who lost parents in the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11th, 2001.

Partnership with PLAN

Nokia has partnered with the international child-centered development organization, Plan, to empower young people to communicate about issues that are important to them. We believe that access to various media such as radio, music video, the internet, mobile devices and television helps to empower young people. Engaging young people helps them become active citizens and enables them to have a say in decisions that affect their lives. Plan and Nokia have programs in Kenya, Egypt and Senegal, as well as Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone and Togo.

These case studies give further examples of Plan projects we supported in 2007:

Music training for street children, Indonesia

Kids Waves